Sunday, August 30, 2015

Ashley Lebanon: Life is short. Have an affair.

The world was never as monogamous oriented in terms of relationship ideal as it is today, in fact it took centuries upon centuries for the concept of monogamy to take root in societies, and the origins of it are more "pragmatic" than "spiritual" - at the core of it, marriage is much more an economic institution than it is a spiritual one (I am not even using the word religious). Yet, the intrinsic notion of marriage nowadays holds a monogamo-religious conotation.
The demonstrators in Beirut started of with the garbage crisis which is eating Lebanon and branched out to wanting the political leaders and the whole sectarian system which builds Lebanon to be thrown out.
I have - in my eventful (or non-eventful depending whom you ask) life - encountered a few specimens of people which I have come to realize are representative of society:
A Christian, 4th year engineering student at AUB once said "we are four brothers at home". Five minutes later, he says "my sister...". Amazed I inquired "but you just said you were four brothers at home"... To which he replied "oh there are four sisters but we don't even register them with the state, they're just girls you know".
A Moslem shiite, also someone at one point a close acquaintance: "Every time a man humps a woman out of wedlock the throne of God vaccilates with every thrust".
A Moslem sunnite, who is so smart he passed the MENSA test, and who has a master's degree in biology, does not believe in evolution. When I pointed out that the genesis story would implicate incest in that case, he replied "no, because the genes were pure back then".
Notice that these three men, are highly educated, went to universities, one of them is homosexual (sorry not pointing out to which one to avoid any possible identification), one of them drinks against the teaching of his religion (but does not eat pork), and so on and so forth.
So what does this tell us?
It tells us that, if among the highly educated echelon of our society religious views run so deep, and if these people (supposedly called "technocrats") are alleged to change the country and modernize it and basically make new laws which are more population-friendly and initiate a management style which would be more dogmatic, then in essence - we have a problem. Because these "technocracts" are not going to do such a thing.
And in effect, the religious system upon which Lebanon is built basically is not going to go away.
It is an orgy out there.
Ashley Lebanon: My life is short, I am going to have an affair.